Racial Disparities in the Heavy Metal Contamination of Urban Soil in the Southeastern United States.

Daleniece Higgins Jones,Xiaoli Duan,Qian Guo,Xinhua Yu,Chunrong Jia

doi:10.3390/ijerph19031105

Abstract

(1) Background: Field monitoring data for addressing the disproportional burden of exposure to soil contamination in communities of minority and low socioeconomic status (SES) are sparse. This study aims to examine the association between soil heavy metal levels, SES, and racial composition. (2) Methods: A total of 423 soil samples were collected in the urban areas of eight cities across six Southern states in the U.S., in 2015. Samples were analyzed using inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP–MS) for eight heavy metals. The association was examined with mixed models with the log-transformed metal concentrations as the dependent variables and rankings of low-income or minority percentages as the explanatory variables. (3) Results: Model results showed that soil metal concentrations were significantly associated with rankings of poverty and minority percentages. The cadmium concentration significantly increased by 4.7% (p-value < 0.01), for every 10 percentiles of increase in poverty rank. For every 10 percentiles of increase in minority rank, the soil concentrations were significantly up (p-values < 0.01) for arsenic (13.5%), cadmium (5.5%), and lead (10.6%). Minority rank had significant direct effects on both arsenic and lead. (4) Conclusions: The findings confirmed elevated heavy metal contamination in urban soil in low-income and/or predominantly minority communities.

Highlights

Growing evidence has documented disproportionate exposure to environmental pollution among low-income and minority populations [1–4]
The objective of this study is to examine the association between soil heavy metal levels, socioeconomic status (SES), and racial composition across the Southeastern area of the United States (U.S.), as a part of the EPA’s Regional
Our analyses suggest that areas with a higher population of minorities have an increased exposure to heavy metal contamination in their environments

Summary

Introduction

Growing evidence has documented disproportionate exposure to environmental pollution among low-income and minority populations [1–4]. Previous studies examined spatial distributions of environmentally hazardous facilities and revealed the clustering of these facilities in or near communities of color, and in poverty [5,6]. Numerous studies have found a significant association between environmental exposure and socioeconomic status (SES)/racial compositions [1–3,5]. These two types of studies mostly had ecological designs in which the unit of analyses was census tract [1,5–7], zip code [5,6,8], or county [5,6,9]. A few studies conducted environmental disparity analyses at an individual level [10–12], for the need to determine individuals’ health risks. Most individual-level studies utilized body burdens of chemical toxicants measured by the

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion